Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COMPHIL (Composing Philosophy: Amateurism and Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-09-01 do 2022-08-31
Since around 1900, composers of classical music have regularly mined well-known philosophical texts for compositional material: in other words, they have “composed philosophy.” Starting with an explosion of settings and other musical adaptations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, compositions that set texts taken directly from major philosophical works, use operatic librettos on the lives of significant philosophers, or include a decidedly philosophical program have become increasingly common. Yet scholarship has produced a piecemeal and methodologically limited view of the practice, primarily due to the general tendency in historical musicology to heavily privilege the works of canonical composers and to ascribe philosophical expertise to these composers as well.
The interdisciplinary project Composing Philosophy: Amateurism and Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music, offers an alternative view of the practice of “composing philosophy” that focuses on the status of classical composers as philosophical amateurs—my term for individuals who engage deeply with philosophy while being inexpert in it. This project questions persistent assumptions about mastery and canonicity within music, through exploring the significance of how philosophical amateurism and compositional creativity interact to reconfigure the way the relationship between music and philosophy is conceived. In my account, composers who are philosophical amateurs are primarily trained in and deeply initiated into classical music culture and not into the discipline of philosophy or its way of thinking about texts. The position of the musician as philosophical amateur is thus shared by and has been artistically significant for a large group of composers, and has led to a host of related, shared compositional practices within classical music in general.
Three main objectives have guided the research in the project; they run as leitmotives through more specific research into individual chapter-length case studies, which will be published as a monograph. The project has determined subtle ways in which (objective 1) amateur approaches to the philosophical tradition inject a popularizing element into otherwise elite classical music culture; (objective 2) musical composition poeticizes philosophy, intervening in the relationship between philosophy and poetry; and (objective 3) gender, sexuality, and other social aspects of composers’ identities (including religious identity, a new discovery since the project was proposed) impacted specific composers’ adaptations of musical texts into their composers, as well as how these have been received by performers, music critics, musicologist, and to a more limited extent, philosophers. The particularity of the findings for each more specific chapter also offer a wealth of other reflections on how musical settings of philosophical materials operate in divergent historical and other contexts.
The interdisciplinary project Composing Philosophy: Amateurism and Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music, offers an alternative view of the practice of “composing philosophy” that focuses on the status of classical composers as philosophical amateurs—my term for individuals who engage deeply with philosophy while being inexpert in it. This project questions persistent assumptions about mastery and canonicity within music, through exploring the significance of how philosophical amateurism and compositional creativity interact to reconfigure the way the relationship between music and philosophy is conceived. In my account, composers who are philosophical amateurs are primarily trained in and deeply initiated into classical music culture and not into the discipline of philosophy or its way of thinking about texts. The position of the musician as philosophical amateur is thus shared by and has been artistically significant for a large group of composers, and has led to a host of related, shared compositional practices within classical music in general.
Three main objectives have guided the research in the project; they run as leitmotives through more specific research into individual chapter-length case studies, which will be published as a monograph. The project has determined subtle ways in which (objective 1) amateur approaches to the philosophical tradition inject a popularizing element into otherwise elite classical music culture; (objective 2) musical composition poeticizes philosophy, intervening in the relationship between philosophy and poetry; and (objective 3) gender, sexuality, and other social aspects of composers’ identities (including religious identity, a new discovery since the project was proposed) impacted specific composers’ adaptations of musical texts into their composers, as well as how these have been received by performers, music critics, musicologist, and to a more limited extent, philosophers. The particularity of the findings for each more specific chapter also offer a wealth of other reflections on how musical settings of philosophical materials operate in divergent historical and other contexts.
The work performed during the project period including archival and secondary source research on the historical case studies described below in the chapters of the planned book, as well as interviews with current composers involved in working with composing philosophy for a planned chapter, and the engagement with various communities of musicians, scholars, and the general public on the topic. The dissemination of the results of this project so far took the form of conference presentations at internationally important conferences, campus colloquy talks, a workshop with composers at Oxford University, the widely-watched online symposium “Vernacular Philosophies of Music,” the public discussion-concert “Songs on Poems of Friedrich Nietzsche,” and a website project. A peer-reviewed article and the planned book will be published after the project period.
In the introduction and chapter one, I define “philosophical amateurism” as practiced by musicians and, especially, composers, as something characterized by a specifically musical way of reacting to or engaging with philosophical texts. This amateurism frequently involves poetization of the philosophical material, embodied engagement with philosophical texts, and an aspirational approach to esoteric or abstract realms of thought. Chapter one looks at the implications of this idea for fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century settings of Nietzsche’s poem “O Mensch, gib Acht,” from Also Sprach Zarathustra. I show that compositions ranging from Mahler’s Symphony no. 3 to songs and choral works by numerous professional and amateur musicians exemplify an amateur’s approach to Nietzsche in their focus on a short poem from the book and in their outreach to amateur musical participation, as well. Chapter two focuses on semi-operatic and operatic works from the early to mid-twentieth century that model an amateur engagement with philosophy by substituting the life story of major philosophers for an argumentative treatment of their texts, including Erik Satie’s Socrate, Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman’s Plato’s Dood and Julius Drossin’s Spinoza: A Life in Three Acts. In all three cases a philosopher’s person comes to be a corporeal representation of the place of their philosophical contributions in daily life, and the stories told often reflect other important aspects of the works' contexts. Chapter three, based on interviews with composers at a variety of career stages today, looks at how individuals and broader communities of composers today view the place of “composing philosophy” as it is primarily discussed in this project; while some composers find it to be a profitable practice, within certain limited frameworks, others also express distrust respecting uses of philosophy that are too overt or not well-enough integrated into the fibers of a composition; still more suggest that to engage with new music from, say, feminist or other gendered perspectives might be to leave what is typically understood to be “philosophical” material behind. Chapter four turns to the matter of “philosophical” instrumental program music, by contextualizing Leonard Bernstein’s programmatic instrumental work, the Serenade (after Plato’s “Symposium”) for Violin, String Orchestra, and Percussion within Bernstein’s reputation as an “accessible” tonalist modernist composer. It then focuses on the role of Plato’s homoerotic text on the intensely positive private reception that the piece received within Bernstein’s circle of normative-male homosexual close friends and colleagues, as well as the way that the piece’s musical style can be said to be in conversation with queer ideas about time both in the period of the piece’s composition and more recently. Chapter five offers a case study of Kate Soper’s IPSA DIXIT (Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017), which uses large portions of Aristotle’s Poetics, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics for its libretto, focusing on how Soper’s piece, which strongly involves a woman soprano in a sometimes monodramatic role while also emphasizing intensive chamber-ensemble collaboration, offers a deep and witty critique of philosophical authority that invokes feminist relational aesthetics. Chapter six concludes the book with a discussion of what I call “the persistence of practices,” remarking on the particular upswing of pieces that involve “composing philosophy” that have just appeared in the past twenty years.